See part 1 here.

And as he began to play with the thread, to spin it around his fingers, a feeling arose inside him–a feeling that just stopped short of words but whose meaning was clear to Paul. It was a swelling in the chest that felt like pride and relief and satisfaction all at once, a sense that what was happening before him was something unique, belonging to no one else, that he held greatness in his hand, and it felt awful and wonderful at the same time.

It’s…mine. The light is mine.

Because he was so engrossed in the light, he did not hear his mother’s footsteps approaching the closet door, and he cried out in shock when she opened the door and the light from outside flooded in. It stung his eyes and it took a moment for them to readjust, and when his vision cleared, his hands were empty and his mother was bending down, tears running down her cheeks and her eyes red and her arms outstretched. She hugged Paul–though it felt more like she was clinging to him. 
I’m sorry, mommy’s sorry, she had a bad day at work, do you know how hard it is?, please, please, I’m so sorry, I love you so much. I’ll never do it again, I promise. I love you, she said. It was not the first time that Paul had heard this, and he had no idea whether ten minutes had really passed or she had decided to let him go early, and he knew before long she would in fact do it again. But as he rested in his mother’s embrace, the thought of the light in that darkness began to feel less real than this warmth, this heat which reminded him that even though she was mean and unfair and kept locking him in that rotten closet, she was still mommy, and that somehow, the darkness she exiled him to had given him a gift. A gift that he longed to have and hold for the next time.

It’s ok, he told her, not for the first time. But he always meant it. It’s ok, cause I love you too.

***

Paul discovered that the thread of light only came in the darkness. He had tried the moment he found time alone to summon it again: by squeezing his eyes shut and thinking very, very hard, by snapping his fingers, even by blowing air into his cupped hands. Nothing would work, until he entered the closet again and shut the door. There, he discovered, he could summon more than one thread of light; he could summon two or three, and while they were as loose as yarn in his fingers, he found that they would snap themselves into a grid if he arranged them perpendicular to one another, like a tic-tac-toe board floating in the air. Near-blinding pulses of light flowed through them. When he gained the ability to summon four threads, the light was as bright as that of the bulb overhead; no corner of the closet remained unlit. He would then wind the threads around his fingers like a loom, making crisscrossed shapes between them.

And the feeling grew: This is what I can do. I’m special. The next time the teachers called him dull and the gym coach called him slow, he would just think–but I can do this.

One day, during recess, he and his friend Drew were playing with a basketball. Paul would roll it around on the ground and sometimes try his best to sit on it, holding steady for only ten seconds before slipping off its round surface. He would then roll it to Drew, who, being taller and a little stronger, dribbled it clumsily on the concrete court outside.

“My sister,” Drew said as they played, “is such a brat. She threw applesauce in my face at dinner last night! And I was yelling and she started crying and now my dad grounded me for being mean…it’s not fair!”

Paul, an only child and fatherless since the age of 2, nodded. “That sucks,” he said. Drew’s sister was only 2 years old; he had seen her at Drew’s house.

“I mean, he took away my DS too so I couldn’t even do anything in my room! Man, when I grow up…” Drew took the basketball into his hands and started looking up, as if he were staring at a much taller person standing over him–or maybe it was at the sky. “I’ll make all of them pay. Really. They can’t get away with this. I swear….”

“So whattya gonna do?”

“I’ll…” Drew paused. He dribbled the ball for a moment. His shoulders grew slack and then slumped. “I–I dunno,” he said.

“You hate them, don’t you?”

Drew shook his head. “No, I don’t. Not really.” He sat on the ball. “But she’s still a brat.”

Paul tried his best to smile. “Yeah.” He held out his hands. “Can I have the ball now?”

They chatted and tossed the ball around, when Jerome, a blond and curly-haired boy with a perpetual smirk on his face, spotted them. Paul’s heart sank. He was bringing two others with him, Evan and Tom, and both he and Drew stood up. They were fifth graders, not measly third graders like themselves, and no matter how hard Paul tried to swing at them Jerome would always grab his arm and twist it behind his back, and while he was pinned Evan and Tom would take turns pummelling his exposed body. Drew usually fared no better.

Paul and Drew stood closer together. They had talked about what they would do the next time Jerome and his posse came. As the taunting began, they nodded at each other and smiled. This time, they would win. This time, they wouldn’t have to go home with black eyes.

A New Short Story

Installments to come every other day until completion.

The closet that Paul’s mother locked him in smelled like dust and rotten mint. He smelled it after he was done screaming, crying, begging his mother to open the door; after that, his nose sharpened in the way the non-visual senses did for a blind man. It took about two minutes for his eyes to become accustomed to the dark, and when they did, he figured the odor probably came from old mothballs that had long lost their potency. Sometimes when he was inside, he imagined that the tingling he felt on his fingertips, on his arms, were the feathery wings of moths brushing against his skin.

But Paul couldn’t tell, because it was too dark. All that was left for him to do was to heave some sobs–his throat had long given way to hoarseness–and wait for the door, the light, to open his eyes again. He swore from early on that he would NOT think about whatever Bad Thing it was that supposedly landed him there–coming home late from school, a bad report card on penmanship, the teaching calling again to say that he wasn’t doing the exercises in PE but playing with a ball by himself. It was the last one again this time. She had told him to think about what he had done. And again, he would refuse.

The dark still scared him, but he was used to it. He waited for a while.

Paul stood up. He felt the sleeves of shirts and coats stroke his arms. He could tell by the touch of the fabric that on his left were his mother’s old, probably moth-eaten silk blouses, and on his right were the fake fur coats that she wore during the winter, made of a harsh, spindly synthetic fur that stung his skin. One day he had wandered into the closet, when his mother hadn’t come home yet from work and he was by himself, and looked at his constant companions in the light. Now, he tried to imagine seeing them in the dark. There were the two buttons on the shirt–right, there, he had them between his fingers. There was the pocket of the fake fur coat–he dug his right hand into it, finding nothing. He knew most of the other clothes beside them too, even though none of them belonged to him.

He squeezed his eyes shut, and then opened them. It made no difference. He reached impulsively for the knob of the closet door. He missed and banged his fingers on the door, sending a loud knock in the closet.

“Ten more minutes!” his mother shouted. She sounded like she was in the next room. Somewhere far away.

Paul felt the tears welling up in his eyes again. The air felt oppressive and suffocating in this darkness. He tried to reach for a light cord hanging down from the ceiling, even though he knew he couldn’t reach it with his 8-year-old height, yearning to be able to somehow find one box that he could stand on even though he knew there wasn’t one, longing for somehow, magically, a light–

A faint flicker danced in front of his eyes for less than a second. It looked like an elongated white spark, a tiny white thread that flashed just above his outstretched fingers. He knew it was light and not his eyes, because in that dazzling moment, he saw the buttons on the blouse he had touched a moment ago. He stretched out his fingers again. This time, a longer strand of white light appeared, hovering in the cup of his hand. It stayed there for about two seconds before it flickered out, enough time for him to turn around and see the fake fur coat.

He knew instinctively that something was happening–I can make light!–and he dropped his right arm to his side and then, with a spasm of his elbow, jerked his outstretched hand upward. A thread as bright as a halogen bulb materialized into view. It burned steadily and hovered in the air, even after he dropped his arm. The light’s bloom illuminated the entire closet. He saw the rows of clothes on their racks and the ceiling and the dirty brown carpet under his feet.

Gingerly, Paul reached out his hand and touched the thread. It gave way to his poke and bent its contour around his finger, like rubber. It was not hot, like he had feared. Breathing heavily, Paul pinched the thread between his thumb and his forefinger. It felt solid, but nearly weightless, like the touch of the silk of his mother’s blouse and as thin as a guitar string.

He tugged at it. It moved in the direction he commanded. He grabbed the whole thread and brought it forward to examine it. Now his chest, his hands, were plainly visible. His skin seemed to glow in the thread’s brightness.

To be continued…

OK, OK . . . I give up. Sort of.

I tried writing this weekend, and discovered it was still taking me 2 hours to do just 1000 words. Mostly because I’m going without an outline, and having to make up plot turns and action on the spot, and worrying a great deal about things like believability and structure. At the current rate, to finish 50,000 words by the end of November, I’d have to do 2500 words a day–I thought about breaking that up by doing half of that in the daytime and half of that in the evening. The only problem is that I’ve got a midterm coming up at the end of this week, and I’m pretty behind in Greek right now. I don’t think I have 3-4 hours a day to spare to write.

So here’s the new plan. I haven’t given up on The Reckoning Hour, by any means. It’s got some of the best ideas I’ve ever come up with. But I should have learned some lessons from last year’s experience. This is about what worked before.

–First off, I’m going to write and finish the outline. Last year’s novel didn’t have a complete outline when I started writing, and that fact bogged me down. This year’s experiment of going without one at all has ended up a failure: I felt that much more uncertain whenever I was writing, and it took a lot more energy than it has to.
–After I finish the outline, the new writing schedule is 1000 words a day, 6 days a week (all but Sunday). This was the pace that helped me finish my last novel, True Sight, so I know this is a manageable pace. It seems suited to my attention span, for one.
–I would like to make 1000 words a day the permanent writing quota: that is, except for some vacations between projects, I will always be continually working on a project at that pace. You won’t believe the backlog I have of ideas, screenplays, and even half-finished novels I’ve got lying around that I’ve always intended on finishing. If I just applied this quota to all my other projects, they’d get done.
–The novel will be released one chapter at a time, as stated before. This hasn’t changed.
–Good news for all you out there in Internetland: this pace gives me enough time to resume regular blogging. Posts will resume Wednesday this week on the normal MWF schedule.

So basically this means I’ve given up on finishing this month. But I have not yet admitted defeat in making writing a regular habit and part of my life. I needed Nanowrimo last year to kick start me out of a long post-university creative slump, and I’m grateful for that. But I don’t think it gives me the kind of pace I can sustain over a long haul. So I’m unlikely to try doing it again in the future. It’s just too much, and this time around I do care about the quality of my work. I’d like to write 1000 GOOD words, because it’s been a long time since I’ve written any fiction that I’ve truly been happy with.

Anyways, before this starts turning into a Piro-style rant/excuse, I better stop. Apologies for everyone eagerly waiting new quick installments. I promise–and I say that rarely because I take that commitment very seriously–it will be back. I’m setting a deadline for the end of this week to finish the outline, so the novel will be back in full swing by next week. I think I can do that.